Month: February 2011

Are you ready for the Republican primaries? Are you ready for Newt 2.0?

It appears that the New York Times is cribbing off Matt Taibbi. I think that’s a good thing, although Taibbi might want some attribution. Either way, we’re still screwed.

With all the goings-on in Africa and Southwest Asia, Al Jazeera has become my newspaper of choice (though it’s not a newspaper…) much like the Financial Times did in the run-up to the current Iraq War.  Al Jazeera comes through, on a different topic:

In early March, China‘s National People’s Congress will approve its  12th Five-Year Plan. This plan is likely to go down in history as one of  China’s boldest strategic initiatives.

In essence, it will change the character of China’s economic model –  moving from the export- and investment-led structure of the past 30  years toward a pattern of growth that is driven increasingly by Chinese  consumers. This shift will have profound implications for China, the  rest of Asia, and the broader global economy.

Like the Fifth Five-Year Plan, which set the stage for the “reforms  and opening up” of the late 1970s, and the Ninth Five-Year Plan, which  triggered the marketisation of state-owned enterprises in the  mid-1990’s, the upcoming Plan will force China to rethink the core value  propositions of its economy.

Premier Wen Jiabao laid the groundwork four years ago, when he first  articulated the paradox of the “Four `Uns” – an economy whose strength  on the surface masked a structure that was increasingly “unstable,  unbalanced, uncoordinated, and ultimately unsustainable”.

I have no love for China’s government, and I say this as a socialist.  Even in the mainstream media at this point, outside of pure propagandists like those on Fox and their ilk on the other outlets (of whom there are plenty), there’s not too much talk about socialism when discussing China, at least not in the same terms as one heard during the Cold War, either for or against.  Socialism lies in the relationship of labor to the means of production.  Marx, 1844:

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production.  It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for  the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the  worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It  replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers  back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a  machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity,  cretinism.

Marx, 1848:

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

In China, labor is exploited as in the United States.  There’s a lot of talk about Chinese growth, however, coupled with unspoken but clear warnings of a Yellow Peril.  The ever-dependable Mr. Buchanan:

With her immense trade surpluses, China’s reserves have surged from $200  billion in 2002 to $2 trillion. Awash in dollars, Beijing now waits  patiently, writes McMillion, to cherry-pick the crown jewels of  America’s industrial empire–“patents, talents, natural resources,  brands”–at fire-sale prices in the global crash.

The important distinction to be made between the United States and China at this point is the role of long-term planning in macroeconomic decision making.  China gives it primary importance, the United States, the clear personal predilections of the President notwithstanding, discounts its possibility.  To be sure, there’s no actual theoretical discussion of this in the press: even a Paul Krugman, while pushing a Keynesian approach in his Times column, never extends the point (to my knowledge) to advocate for a role for macroeconomic planning in principle.

It should be noted that the glorious wars so mythologized by the right were won by economic planning.  That is to say, without planning, the French would be speaking German today.  From the Monthly Review:

[D]uring the Second World War, Harry [Magdoff] was actively involved in planning for machine-making firms in the United States. It took a long time for companies to adapt to the central plan, for selfish reasons and private business mentality. At an early stage, stumbling blocks were common in the airplane industries, limiting urgently needed production. One airplane company had more machine tools of some types than was needed but not enough of another type. Production was stalled in many firms for like reasons. Harry was called in to try to find a way out and proposed a possible solution that worked. It involved coordination of supply procedures. Before long, the plan began to work, in large part by taking the human elements into account. Business leaders had been trained to be guided by the market. Bookkeepers and other clerical workers had long-ingrained habits of work where standard practices had to be quickly changed. The bosses were consulted and their suggestions helped design details of the plan. Exceptional accuracy was required of clerical workers. To get the cooperation needed, meetings were held with the workers, without bosses present. The plan was described and the reasons for it explained. Then the workers were asked for their opinions and advice, much of which influenced the final shape of the program.

The skepticism that people feel about the efficacy or even possibility of central planning admits only the shortcomings while denying the achievements. There is nothing in central planning that requires commandism and confining all aspects of planning to the central authorities. That occurs because of the influence of special bureaucratic interests and the overarching power of the state. Planning for the people has to involve the people. Plans of regions, cities, and towns need the active involvement of local populations, factories, and stores in worker and community councils. The overall program–especially deciding the distribution of resources between consumption goods and investment–calls for people’s participation. And for that, the people must have the facts, a clear way to inform their thinking, and contribute to the basic decisions.

All this took place in a capitalist economy with capitalist labor relations.  Socialism may require macroeconomic planning, but planning does not require socialism.  Be clear about that.  We are talking about capitalist planning, and the proof was in the successful prosecution of the war–success defined strictly in military terms.  Unfortunately, the Monthly Review gets no attention in our discourse, which has always confounded me.

A look at any high school economics text, which is the best representation of US economic mythologizing one will find, will see primarily a discussion in terms of freedom.  This is one of the great problems in the United States: we have defined our notion of freedom as “freedom from” rather than “freedom to.”  Above all, we have our least-examined Big Lie: the “Free Market.”  There’s nothing free about the market mechanism, which is a means of determining price and nothing more.  One’s choices are limited by any number of factors, even if we only consider those as understood in capitalist economics, like scarcity.  Indeed, the notion of opportunity cost implies a limit to whatever freedom the market might offer.  We imagine that if government is not directly involved, then we are, ipso facto, free.  This clearly is nonsense.  There are all kinds of other considerations that limit our freedom as human beings, and the number of poor people in the US who rave about living in a free country would be laughable if it weren’t so deeply sad.

At some point and still among some groups of people–neoliberal economists above all, and acolytes of Ayn Rand–the critique of planning took on a more developed form.  We begin at the beginning, with Ludwig von Mises‘ 1920 critique of the “Economic Calculation Problem,” so-called:

Money could never fill in a socialist state the role it fills in a competitive society in determining the value of production goods. Calculation in terms of money will here be impossible…

[A]s soon as one gives up the conception of a freely established monetary price for goods of a higher order, rational production becomes completely impossible. Every step that takes us away from private ownership of the means of production and from the use of money also takes us away from rational economics.

The neoliberal intelligentsia, such as it was and continues to be, used up a good deal of verbage declaring things that were taking place to be impossible.  A later example, from Mrs. (not Ms.) Thatcher, well-known:

Who is society? There is no such thing!

We also have a discussion, worthy of Newt Gingrich, of what is and therefore what is not “rational.”  I can’t think of a better example of what Foucault labeled “power-knowledge” than this particular discussion of planning.  The argument goes like this: price, a result of the market mechanism, i.e., supply vs. demand, is information one uses in order to make a rational economic calculation.  Goods are allocated socially based on the individual calculations based on price and weighing opportunity cost and shortages and surpluses are thus avoided.  Since state intervention through planning changes–Milton Friedman would say, “distorts”–price, that is to say, the information one uses to make a rational calculation, state planning cannot be, because of the distorted price, rational.  This limits the ability of people to conceive of planning as an actual possibility within the limits of the discourse we actually have in this country.

Leave off the fact that the state has always been an economic actor, and therefore no market has ever functioned without state intervention of a sort, if only as a consumer.  Leave off, too, that the social distribution of goods so described means that the rich get the most stuff and that the language used totally obscures this.  I am most concerned with the equation of economic rationality with the absence of surpluses and shortages, that is to say with efficiency, narrowly defined.  Marcuse critiqued this in One-Dimensional Man:

We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced  industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.

It could be for example perfectly rational to plan in such  a way that a society is certain that there will be a surplus of food  available, accept the inefficiency of producing food that isn’t needed in exchange for not having hungry people.  We don’t do that here in the United States, but our agriculture is very efficient, as is our market mechanism, taken by itself, ruthlessly so, like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition.

The problem is a fundamental contradiction of capitalist decision making, which one might think of if one wants to avoid an explicitly Marxian analysis, as the difference between microconomics and macroeconomics.  To look at my own life: I hate driving, but I love biking and I love public transit, especially trains but also buses.  Public transit systems take all kinds of guff in the press because they don’t generally make money.  The state needs to allocate resources to fund them.  So, public transit is inefficient and therefore “irrational,” because what sense in there in keeping afloat an economic enterprise that constantly loses money?  If one adopts capitalist logic, in which the end of economy must be profit, this is irrational.  If one looks macroeconomically, though, it makes a lot of sense, bearing in mind the material limits of the viability of internal combustion engine transportation in the long-term–in 2011 I might say “near medium-term”–to have an alternative system in place so that the economy as a whole can allocate resources to greater profit in other sectors.  So, too with health care.

China, institutionally, has in its planning mechanism a real check on the narrow interests of capitalists.  Returning to the Al Jazeera article, one might become someone jealous and wish to be Chinese.

Instead, under the new Plan, China will adopt a more labor-intensive  services model. It will, one hopes, provide a detailed blueprint for the  development of large-scale transactions-intensive industries such as  wholesale and retail trade, domestic transport and supply-chain  logistics, health care, and leisure and hospitality.

Such a transition would provide China with much greater job-creating  potential. With the employment content of a unit of Chinese output more  than 35 per cent higher in services than in manufacturing and  construction, China could actually hit its employment target with slower  GDP growth. Moreover, services are far less resource-intensive than  manufacturing – offering China the added benefits of a lighter, cleaner,  and greener growth model.

The long-term macroeconomic health of any society that’s bigger than Singapore is a function of its domestic market.  That means that people need jobs to buy stuff.  The Chinese government understands this, as well as understands given natural limits to growth the need for “less resource-intensive” growth, When the market fails to provide these, reason dictates, the state might well intervene.  It’s not a complex proposition.  Unfortunately, our President has to contend with this nonsense:

…So be it.

It is possible to be rational without being real, and that’s precisely how we do it in the United States.  The President understands this but also knows that to fight it is more than just a political question, much less an even more narrowly defined legislative battle.  Chinese capitalists, however, owe their existence as capitalists to the planners, and as a result the planners still hold sway.  This bodes well for China and less well for the United States.

I am not suggesting that Chinese planning will save the day, economically or environmentally.  China has two contradictory goals: surpass the United States in both the raw size of GDP and then, later, per capita GDP, and sustain that supremacy over the long-term.  The first is a matter of waking up from the nightmare that began in 1492 or so.  We won’t be happy as a species until we move past everything the disastrous creation of the modern world entailed and continues to.  The second requires an economy that doesn’t destroy the species in the process.  This is a tough balancing act that may well not be possible to maintain using the mechanism of the state, let alone the market.

‘Nuff said, I’m done.
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Crossposted at http://www.palaverer.com/

It seems worth pausing to take note of this:

WEST POINT, N.Y. — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

By implication, of course, this means that the entire Bush administration, a good number of Democrats, nearly the entire news media, and a healthy percentage of the American people should have their heads examined. But, obviously, that’s almost the entire premise of this blog.

At this point in his career it may be that Chistopher Hitchens just wants to take shots at Democrats, and that might explain his grossly unfair take on the White House’s performance on Egypt, Libya, and the democratic wave in the Middle East in general. He comes out swinging, acknowledging that the president is a Christian and Hawai’ian born, but wondering if he might actually be Swiss.

After asserting that dictators in the Arab world know that their reign is over when the Swiss close their bank accounts, he accuses the Obama administration of overcaution and timidity.

A Middle Eastern despot now knows for sure when his time in power is well and truly up. He knows it when his bankers in Zurich or Geneva cease accepting his transfers and responding to his confidential communications and instead begin the process of “freezing” his assets and disclosing their extent and their whereabouts to investigators in his long-exploited country. And, at precisely that moment, the U.S. government also announces that it no longer recognizes the said depositor as the duly constituted head of state…

…The Obama administration also behaves as if the weight of the United States in world affairs is approximately the same as that of Switzerland. We await developments. We urge caution, even restraint. We hope for the formation of an international consensus. And, just as there is something despicable about the way in which Swiss bankers change horses, so there is something contemptible about the way in which Washington has been affecting—and perhaps helping to bring about—American impotence. Except that, whereas at least the Swiss have the excuse of cynicism, American policy manages to be both cynical and naive.

To begin with, Hitchens has the most basic facts wrong. While it’s true that Switzerland froze the assets of Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak, they did so only after they stepped down. Here’s the Economic Times discussing the Swiss government’s decision to freeze Gaddafi’s assets:

In the past weeks, the Swiss government had frozen the assets of the ousted Tunisian President Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek, but only after they were swept out of office by the popular uprisings against their regimes.

The Swiss government’s decision to freeze Gaddafi’s bank accounts while he is still clinging to power is an unprecedented move that wouldn’t have even been legal under Swiss law prior to the reforms they passed last October. And, as press secretary Jay Carney made clear on the February 25th, the United States is also making similar efforts in what appears to be a coordinated effort with our allies.

Earlier today the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued an advisory to U.S. financial institutions to take reasonable risk-based steps with respect to the potential increased movement of assets that may be related to the situation in Libya.

During this period of uncertainty, FinCEN is reminding U.S. financial institutions of their requirement to apply enhanced scrutiny for private banking accounts held by or on behalf of senior foreign political figures, and to monitor transactions that could potentially represent misappropriated or diverted state assets, proceeds of bribery or other illegal payments, or other public corruption proceeds.

So, contra Hitchens, there has been no “precise moment” after the Swiss have acted when the U.S. has decided to ditch its support for Arab dictators. The entire premise of his article is based on a lie. But, beyond that, his article is completely unfair. Let’s look at this next bit:

For weeks, the administration dithered over Egypt and calibrated its actions to the lowest and slowest common denominators, on the grounds that it was difficult to deal with a rancid old friend and ally who had outlived his usefulness. But then it became the turn of Muammar Qaddafi—an all-round stinking nuisance and moreover a long-term enemy—and the dithering began all over again. Until Wednesday Feb. 23, when the president made a few anodyne remarks that condemned “violence” in general but failed to cite Qaddafi in particular—every important statesman and stateswoman in the world had been heard from, with the exception of Obama.

Setting aside Egypt for the moment, it’s not true that Obama waited until the 23rd to make a comment on events in Libya. On the morning of the 18th, press secretary Jay Carney met with reporters on Air Force One and shared with them a press release that expressed “deep concern” about violence in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen, and urged all three governments to show restraint in dealing with peaceful protesters.

When the president made his remarks on February 23rd, his comments were not “anodyne.” He said that Libya had the responsibility to respect people’s human rights, to refrain from violence, and that if they did not they would “face the cost of continued violations of human rights.” He discussed efforts to coordinate a response and to have the international community speak in one voice of condemnation. In the meantime, he was working behind the scenes to get American citizens out of the country so they would not become hostages or pawns in Gaddafi’s desperate effort to cling to power. Hitchen’s has nothing but contempt for this effort to protect our citizens and deny Gaddafi a potential gambit.

Evidently a little sensitive to the related charges of being a) taken yet again completely by surprise, b) apparently without a policy of its own, and c) morally neuter, the Obama administration contrived to come up with an argument that maximized every form of feebleness. Were we to have taken a more robust or discernible position, it was argued, our diplomatic staff in Libya might have been endangered. In other words, we decided to behave as if they were already hostages! The governments of much less powerful nations, many with large expatriate populations as well as embassies in Libya, had already condemned Qaddafi’s criminal behavior, and the European Union had considered sanctions, but the United States (which didn’t even charter a boat for the removal of staff until Tuesday) felt obliged to act as if it were the colonel’s unwilling prisoner. I can’t immediately think of any precedent for this pathetic “doctrine,” but I can easily see what a useful precedent it sets for any future rogue regime attempting to buy time. Leave us alone—don’t even raise your voice against us—or we cannot guarantee the security of your embassy.

Who’s treating the U.S. as no more important than Switzerland now? Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Moammar Gaddafi knows that he’s defined himself for two and a half decades as the man who stood up to the U.S. Air Force and survived. He’s erected monuments to that effect. If he wants to take hostages, he’s taking American hostages. Hitchens knows that, he’s just being a dick. And one has to ask, “what’s the hurry?” Are we in such a rush to save Libyan dissenters that we disregard the safety of our own citizens and embassy staff? I know we live in a 24-hour news cycle these days, but this is a ridiculous demand.

Finally, it’s quite clear that Hitchens thinks we should be invading Libya by air and sea.

The United States, with or without allies, has unchallengeable power in the air and on the adjacent waters. It can produce great air lifts and sea lifts of humanitarian and medical aid, which will soon be needed anyway along the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, and which would purchase undreamed-of goodwill. It has the chance to make up for its pointless, discredited tardiness with respect to events in Cairo and Tunis. It also has a president who has shown at least the capacity to deliver great speeches on grand themes. Instead, and in the crucial and formative days in which revolutions are decided, we have had to endure the futile squawkings of a cuckoo clock.

The White House is working less martial angles (although the Pentagon is working on contingencies). But this is what I’ve been complaining about for several days. Why does Hitchens and so many other people think it is our responsibility to protect the people of Libya? I mean, we have a responsibility in a collective sense, which is the same sense in which the Swiss have a responsibility. But why are we supposed to be flying the planes? Why does everyone look to us? Where’s Obama? Where’s the U.S.?

This is an armed insurrection, not a peaceful protest in Tahrir Square. Do we even know who we want to win?

It seems to me that the president should be given credit for his willingness to put human rights on a higher plane than our short-term self-interest in sticking with brutish allies for the sake of stability and lucre. Hitchens used to be a champion of the dispossessed and politically oppressed. Now he just wants us to blow shit up before the weekend. He’s only one drunken blow-hard, but he speaks for a lot of people both in this country and abroad.

It’s always our job. It’s always our fault.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I’ll be starting an entirely new painting.  I will be using the photo seen directly below.  I’m working on an 8×10 canvas in my usual acrylic paints.

The photo shows the Pink House, a well known Victorian structure in Cape May, New Jersey.  I’ve usually avoided the well known houses (tourist oriented) but this particular photo appealed to me.

I began by setting down marks at the edge of the canvas that I’ll use to orient the image and set the proper proportions of the various elements.  They are still visible.  I then did a rough outline, in pink of course.  I’ve got to work on that perspective.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

   

That’s about it for now. Next week I’ll have more progress to show you. See you then. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

If an elected official refers to the Civil War as the “War of Yankee Aggression” on the floor of the House of Representatives, is that something that is just a matter of free speech/opinion, or is it something that violates some rule or law? Is it something that the House can or should sanction or censure?

I ask this in all seriousness. I think there is a difference between what a private citizen says in public and what a public official says during official business. And the Yankees won the war and they enshrined that victory in law, including the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. If anyone thinks that the Civil War, which was instigated by the South before Lincoln could even be inaugurated, was a war of Yankee aggression, then don’t they think that the South was right to secede? And then don’t they think the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are illegitimate? And then don’t they think that the present Union is illegitimate? And then don’t they think that the abolition of slavery is illegitimate?

Doesn’t something in all of this violate the oath to protect and defend the Constitution? Can you just say that that the Civil War was a war of Yankee Aggression with impunity? I ask Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA). I ask you.

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Strange how someone can write a silly diary just before taking a nap …
You want America to do everything and then you hate us for it. BooMan talks about human rights to protect citizens of Libya. Somehow Bush became friends with Gaddafi and was favored for oil contracts .. followed by Tony Blair, Sylvio Berlusconi and Angela Merkel.

The world begging Uncle Sam to take the lead and get rid of those nasty WMD’s the UN could’t locate?

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Speech by M. Dominique de Villepin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the United Nations Security Council, New York 19.03.2003

Curveball deserves permanent exile for WMD lies

(Guardian) Feb. 15, 2011 – Politicians in Iraq have called for the permanent exile of the Iraqi defector, codenamed Curveball by his US and German handlers, who admitted to the Guardian he lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi said he invented stories about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent bioweapons programme in order to “liberate” Iraq.

Colin Powell demands answers from CIA and DIA over Curveball’s WMD lies  

• Tony Blair tells Chilcot Inquiry the George Bush letters on Iraq war were very private …

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

The White House makes an announcement:

“The White House is set to make news and history this afternoon when it announces the new social secretary. Jeremy Bernard, currently the chief of staff to the U.S. ambassador to France, will become the third person to hold the job in the Obama administration. But he will be the first man and the first openly gay person to be the first family’s and the executive mansion’s chief event planner and host.”

Now, I could makes some jokes about how much better the music is going to be, but my real concern is for Reps. Steve King of Iowa and Paul Broun of Georgia. Will their heads explode? Some people might ask who will be the first to shoot them, but that would be in bad taste and quite possibly merit a visit from the Secret Service. So, instead, I will inquire about their health. Do you think they’ll be okay? I mean, Mr. Bernard has been serving in France.

France!